The top 20 jobs in the US that people are searching for

A worker sorts items for delivery from the 70,000 square metre warehouse floor at Amazon’s distribution center in Brieselang, near Berlin. (REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz)

As the labor market tightens, it’s drawing out first-time job seekers and those re-entering the workforce — leading to some interesting job searches, according to new data from Indeed.com.

“What we’re looking at here, is the fast growing job searches in the U.S.,” Andrew Flowers, an economist at Indeed.com, told Yahoo Finance. Flowers said the team pulled together all the searches people had made on Indeed.com for the calendar year of 2017, and analyzed the top 20 recurring ones.

The data revealed that the top-searched job last year was for a mobile home park manager role.

Indeed.com’s Martha Gimbel, who also worked on this data, added that while this list reflects the job seekers’ interest, it doesn’t necessarily represent employer needs — “though we would assume that job seekers are at least somewhat responding to employer needs.”

Some of these jobs have had “thousands and thousands of searches” since 2016, but Flowers said that the outpouring of interest in the top 20 came from recent macro trends.

Picture: Indeed.com

For example, the growth in the mobile homes market has led job seekers to believe that there was a demand for managerial and maintenance roles, according to Flowers.

The Manufacturing Housing Institute, a trade organization representing the factory-built housing industry, estimated that in 2017, around 93,000 of the homes in the U.S. were manufactured, up from 81,000 the year before. (Manufactured homes are prefabricated off-site and are also known as mobile homes.)

MHI data shows that the number of manufactured home shipments is steadily growing.

Searches for a “budtender” role also surged in 2017 “as more states had legalized medical marijuana — and presumably, job seekers thought they were hiring,” said Flowers.

Flowers emphasized that the company omitted outliers. So if the job had 1 posting in 2016, and 800 in 2017, they would eliminate that search.

Flowers added that one of the reasons job seekers were looking for these type of jobs could be that these were low-skilled jobs that appealed to those entering the market for the first time, or those who are re-entering (meaning that they previously had given up searching for a job and are now entering the market as an active job seeker).

A worker at an Amazon fulfillment center in Sacramento, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

‘Explosive interest in Amazon’

Flowers pointed out that Amazon (AMZN) was a big draw for people searching on the site.

“There are several job searches here that I think reflect the explosive interest people have in working for Amazon,” Flowers said.

“They’re hiring — they have a lot of postings up — and they are hiring a lot of drivers and particularly fulfillment workers,” Flowers said.

The role of fulfillment workers ranges from selecting items and sorting packages inside Amazon’s warehouses, to shopping for Prime Now customers in a grocery store.